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Tag Archives: Joseph Conrad

In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, Achebe discusses elements such as racism, “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensive mystery”, moral ambivalence, dehumanization of Africa and Africans, and the concepts of culture and identity. Conrad writes about the ivory trade, natural resources exploitation, colonialism and madness using word embellishment and Achebe (1976) does corroborate that in his essay “An image of Africa”, “I would not call that man an artist, for example, who composes an eloquent instigation to one people to fall upon another and destroy them. No matter how striking his imagery or how beautiful his cadences fall, such a man is no more a great artist than another may be called a priest who reads the mass backwards or a physician who poisons his patients” (p.9)

The cultural and identity elements in Conrad’s work addressed by Achebe has to do with the Western image of Africa. Interestingly, one can link Achebe’s thoughts with Clark’s (2008) explanations of the term ‘new racism’, in which inferiority and biological difference are not as important as cultural differences. The idea of cultural identity is so rooted with individuals that it is impossible for two cultures to co-exist (p.518). Achebe expresses those cultural and identity elements as desire or even needs of “the Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe”; dehumanizing Africa and Africans throughout history, denying their culture and undermining African people. Even when some sort of humanity is expressed by Marlow in the novel, it is nothing but social conventions of half decent liberal Englishmen who are “required” to be shocked when witnessing atrocities that characterized the time in which King Leopold ruled Belgium.

Achebe also talks about moral ambivalence when he mentions the missionary Albert Schweitzer, “The African are my brothers, but my junior brothers”, one can clearly realize how the missionary judges the African as being inferior or in need of civilization, when in reality, Africa and Africans have rich cultural and artistic elements that were appreciated by artists; for instance, there is the “mask that had been given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905”, and that consequently inspired other artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Vollard (p. 12) Last but not least, Achebe highlights the matter of “ adjectival insistence” that the English critic F.R Leavis addressed. According to the author, Conrad’s “insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery” call into question artistic good faith since it assails the reader with emotive words, almost like a hypnotic process.

I agree with Achebe’s assessment that Western literature misrepresents Africa and that unfortunately a lot of us still live the consequences of the preconceived image of Africans. I strongly believe that Achebe has a point in his essay “An image of Africa” and that he successfully demystifies the Western view of Africa in both of his works: “Things fall apart” and “An image of Africa”.

In “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, the author states his experiences as captain of a steamer in the Congo River for a Belgium trade company. The author tells his story through elaborated language usage and the hypocrisy of Imperialism in his time. For instance, Chinua Achebe fiercely criticized Joseph Conrad and consequently the novel, saying that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” and the novel is “offensive and deplorable” (107). There are many interesting dual aspects in the novel such as good and evil, man and nature, colonialism as means of “civilization” and “improvement of natives” when, in reality, it was exploitation.

“It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”” (50), indicates how the Europeans see the Africans as mere objects that can be discarded if high functionality is not achieved. Another excerpt that demonstrates the classical English Liberal perspective in which portrays the natives in Africa as savages and cannibals is: “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind- as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much (82) […]” Last but not least, “It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough […]” (49).

Those passages demonstrate how the effects of colonialism were apathetically seen by Conrad. Although he amply describes the atrocities suffered by the Africans through language embellishment, he remains indifferent to their suffering and even justifies exploitation in the name of “progress” and “civilization”. Obviously, Conrad’s views describe him as a man of his time and place which, in my opinion, does not justify colonialism policies and colonial violence. The Africans are not characterized in the novel, they are dehumanized, and, Africa is a mere scenario. Power, moral and values seem to be enigmas that the author tries to decipher in the novel.